


Built A Tower

by middleearthquake



Category: Leverage, Lord of the Rings - Fandom, The Hobbit
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Multi, weird reincarnation au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-01 05:46:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5194433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middleearthquake/pseuds/middleearthquake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let's go steal a ring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Everyone knows that Nate Ford listens to nobody and takes guidance from no one and will, eventually, get his crew killed. He's too obsessive. There's too much ambition. Even his kind of insane brilliance depends largely on luck, and eventually – says Sterling, says Cha0s, says the Italian woman – eventually, he's going to fuck up. 

A professor comes to see them at the bar. 

It would be incorrect to say that this professor waits until Nate is three beers deep into the night, of course. He's just a professor. Ancient languages, he says, smiling with his whole face. His beard is long and white and regal, and his face is gentle and wise. He's like something out of a fairy story, but he's not magic. There's no such thing as magic. There's planning, and there's rare genius, and there's skill and luck and timing, but magic isn't real. This is what Nathan Ford knows, and Nathan Ford is the man who knows all the secrets behind all the tricks. Nate would know if magic was real. 

It's just a coincidence that he finds Nate on Sam's birthday, when Nate is already two beers deep. It's bad luck that he comes to Nathan Ford on his dead child's birthday, when Nate is lost in grief and memory. 

The professor – and does it matter what he calls himself? There have been men like him since the world began, and what they call themselves and what they are called by others so rarely comes to the same thing – the professor shows Nate a picture of a – well, he calls it a family heirloom. 

Lost, for a long time, the professor says. 

Half an ounce of gold, the professor says. Almost worthless, of course, from a practical point of view, but he's not ashamed of his own sentiment. And Nathan Ford has a reputation, now. 

He's heard that Eliot Spencer is good with needles in haystacks, and he's heard that Nathan Ford is the master of impossible odds. 

He wants them to find his ring, he says. 

Just a little thing. 

The most insignificant of golden rings, stolen long ago and nearly destroyed. It's been lost for a very long time. 

Nate doesn't know quite what he feels, looking at the picture of the man's ring. He chalks it up to the whiskey and he chalks it up to the grief, darkest and deepest on this one night, but there's something…

We'll look into it, he tells the professor, that night, and the professor smiles, kindly and grateful, and even drunk and mourning, Nate can tell that there is something wrong about the whole thing. It feels...crafty. 

It feels something like one of Sterling's plots, and something like Sophie's, although Sophie acts for the joy of it, not just for the gain. These days. Still. 

The ring, though. 

It's such a little thing.

A trinket, really. 

Their chances of finding it are low, but there's something about it – even the picture of it – that settles Nate the way that normally only good scotch or the face of a billionaire who's just realized that he's lost everything do. That's not natural, not right; there's a trick to this, a metaphorical trapdoor somewhere, and Nate doesn't like not knowing where all the backdoors and secret passageways are. 

“And to be completely honest,” Nate tells Sophie, smiling tight and toothy into his scotch, “I thought everyone who knew us knew not to use my son against me.”


	2. Chapter 2

But to be fair, it really started when the bearded woman showed up asking for help. 

She stumped into the bar, glaring out the windows, at the tables, at the attractive vases, even – to Hardison's later horror – straight into the security cameras. She dragged a chair up to Nate's spot at the bar without a hello or by-your-leave, dropped a cloth bag in front of him brusquely, and planted herself in front of him with a sort of flat determination. 

“I hear that Eliot Spencer finds things that are lost.” 

It seemed most prudent to give himself a minute, so Nate held up two fingers and downed the rest of his scotch. The bearded woman smiled grimly, which wasn't the best of signs. People who needed their help didn't usually come across this aggressive from the beginning, and people who came looking for Eliot tended to fall into two distinct categories (people looking for _eliot_ and people who wanted _Spencer, Retrieval Specialist_. For – well, not for Nate's money, but for someone's money, the ones who came looking for Eliot brought more trouble than the ones who came looking for revenge or murder.) This woman, though: he stared at her while she twitched, because she didn't...quite...fit with what Nate knew about Eliot. She wore heavy steel-tipped boots, thick jeans with little burns all across the thighs and ankles from the sparks of her welding, and her long dark hair and beard had been braided in complex ornamental patterns that didn't hide just how much gray streaked through her hair. She smelt like burnt metal and electricity. 

“Spencer?” Nate tipped his head back to the ceiling, considering it for half a second, before grinning like a shark at the bearded woman. His eyes were very bright. She was a puzzle. Nate let the thick Boston accent out, the one that he saved for _obnoxious greedy idiot_ , look over there. “Sorry, doesn't ring a bell, don't know any Spencer round here.” Eliot got cross when Nate got in between the people who hunted Eliot and Eliot himself, but sometimes – occasionally – they were problematic or interesting enough to make Nate sit up and take notice. He wanted to see which way this woman would jump, if he poked her: he was full of satiable curiosity, after all. 

Which was something that Sam used to say.

Sophie shrugged, lazy and careless: it was a play Nate liked, a dynamic that worked to unsettle the kind of people who thought they could intimidate them. “If you want to do business with _Spencer_ , go talk to him, we don't handle his business,” she said, and examined her manicure thoughtfully. Her accent had slipped, east and south, and she wasn't making eye contact. 

“Five minutes,” Eliot said, abruptly, through Nate's earbud. 

Judging from the low, raspy cadence of his breath, he was either finishing a fight or moving at speed. 

Which probably meant that Hardison had observed the situation and decided to pull Eliot himself in. 

Hardison came across comms, sounding sleepy and irritated. “Nate, I have a deathly fear of clowns, man, if you drag us into some kind of circus shit – hold on, hold on, how many times I gotta tell y'all? Facial hair messes with my software.” 

“If we're stealing a circus, I want an elephant,” Parker chimed in. 

“No, Parker, you can't – where are you gonna put an elephant?” Eliot growled. “Nate, quit it, you don't want to – I don't know her, I'll be there in ten minutes, don't do anything.” He might not've said _anything stupid_ out loud, but it was hardly necessary. 

“I'm looking for my sons,” the bearded woman said. 

Nate loved his band of thieves. Sophie, when she felt particularly tired of Nate's shit, sometimes smiled and said that he loved the power of controlling the chaos. (Because you're a megalomaniac, she'd said, smiling the way she did when she was honestly cross.) It was true, of course: he loved harnessing their different strains of mad brilliance, and he sometimes got high on the rush when a particularly complicated con clicked together, but he did love these children. These moments, though: the bearded woman met Nate's eyes, and he knew that Hardison had come to attention, felt Eliot shift into a higher gear. Sophie had stopped indulging him; the mention of children was enough to bring all of this power and focus into clarity. 

Hardison came through in admirable speed: “Nate, it's probably – Dìs? Hell if I I'm gonna mangle that last name, Romanian, though – no records of any children.” 

_“I don't know any Dìs,_ ” Eliot panted. “ _Wait. Don't make her any promises_.” 

“You're bullshitting me,” Nate declared, just as Eliot checked himself in front of the door and still managed to mostly fall through it, pulling his hair back and examining the corners as he straightened his overshirt. Damn, Nate thought, absently; dressed like that, he'd be able to introduce Eliot as a carpenter, maybe a welder himself, but certainly nothing more than lower-middle class. Sophie always, and Hardison more, lately, would show up dressed in bland but comfortable clothes that fit a myriad of backgrounds. Eliot and Parker, though – unless they were purposefully dressing for a part, they tended towards clothing that was difficult to explain. 

“Nate,” he growled. 

Dìs gave Eliot one quick, assessing stare. The corner of her mouth curled up, into her braided mustache, thoughtful and serious. “Mr. Spencer,” she said. She had very pale blue eyes, and the contract between dark hair and dark, weathered skin and ice blue eyes would've made her a striking woman without the facial hair. 

“I don't know who sent you here, ma'am,” Eliot started, because there were some things that couldn't be trained out of him. “But I'm not in that line of work anymore.”

“I hear you help people,” Dìs said. “I need help. I have been a long time without my sons and my useless no-good brother, and I am done mourning.” She smiled, again, small and more than a little bitter, and buried her face in one of their hearty dark stouts. “My cousin told me that you were the best,” she added.


End file.
